Nicaraguan bishops extend the challenge of revolution

Letter from Latin America
THE revolution in Nicaragua is approaching a major crisis. In the coming months the cotton and coffee crops will be collected and the eampesinos now employed will be laicToff until the beginning of the next season in the Autumn.
This means that at least a quarter of a million will be unemployed out of three million in a country that is bankrupt and cannot affort to support them.
The last stages of .the fight against the dictator Somoza last year cost 35,000 lives and 10(WX) wounded, the majority of whom still need treatment, and made 40,000 children orphans.
Tomas Borge. one of the revolutionary leaders. said recently that 200 out of every 1,000 children die in infancy. Aid in money and medicines has come, but not enough. Finance. too, has come from the West but as investment expecting return. the benefits of which are unlikely to be felt by the poor.
For the last ten years the Church in Nicaragua has been solidly behind its people. Even so, its present support of the Sandinista revolutionary regime has shaken the Latin American Church.
The bishops meeting at Puebla in Mexico this time last year told the clergy to stay out of politics.
In their Advent pastoral the Nicaraguan bishops declared their support for coin mu nisnt "which is not spurious or false," by which they meant so long as it doesn't diminish freedom of thought or religion, or subject people to the arbitrary whim of whoever happens to be in power.
But they are for it, if it means the predominance of' the interests of the majority and a planned national economy in which all participate."
There is no conflict with Christianity they say, if the process "lessens the inequalities between town and country, between reward for intellectual and manual work: if it helps the worker enjoy the fruits of his labour and stops him being an economic outcast."
Christianity can only approve of "power exercised by the majority and shared increasingly by the people as they become organised, so that there is a Patrick O'Donovan is unwell and is consigned to the Ch arterhou se infirmary. lie
1 promises to be better by next week.
genuine transfer of power to the people."
None of this is going of itself to put food into anybody's mouth, but the bishops see the problem. They know that the Sandinista movement is not basically working class and that although the whole Nicaraguan people united to overthrow Somoza, now business and professions are expecting their traditional position in society to be returned to them.
The radical support or communism is a challenge to the middle class to allow the revolution to benefit the majority in shose name it has fought and without whose support it would never have been won.
Their clergy are firmly behind them. Several Nicaraguans say that one of the decisive factors in the victory last summer was the long term work by the clergy running the small cell-like Christian Communities or the Poor in making the people aware of t heir rights and the oppression the) were suffering.
-1 he Archbishop of Managua said last June that "very many of
the clergy" had joined the SandiniNtas. At the moment there are two priests in the cabinet; Fr Miguel D'Escotto, Foreign Minister and Fr Ernesto Cardenal Minister of Culture.
The remarkable Fr Carderial, who is himself one of the country's most important poets, heads a ministry and movement which is a key unifying force in Nicaragua.
In the last year one of the symbols of the liberation has been the Folk Mass. the Misa Campesina, of Carlos Mcjia Godoy.
As its composer says It is not neutral. It is a Mass against the Oppressor. against all who prevent a share in the land, fruits, flowers, air. water, the basic elements of Nature."
He said recently that "Somoza, helped by American imperialism, has dragged down not only the economy of the country hut also its culture," and that the presence of the multinationals, and all invasions by "colonialist culture threatens to change the face of our people."
Gerald MacCarthy